from 2016: The New York Times' first article about Hitler's rise is absolutely stunning

[tenderfoot]

I'm posting this in response to the recent NY Times coverage of the election in Virginia where a Republican activist was presented as a "concerned parent" and the most recent puff piece about Kyle Rittenhouse.

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

As it turns out, the NY Times has been in the normalizing Fascism business for close to a century.

Times correspondent Cyril Brown spends most of the piece documenting the factors behind Hitler's early rise in Bavaria, Germany, including his oratorical skills. For example: "He exerts an uncanny control over audiences, possessing the remarkable ability to not only rouse his hearers to a fighting pitch of fury, but at will turn right around and reduce the same audience to docile coolness."

But the really extraordinary part of the article is the three paragraphs on anti-Semitism. Brown acknowledges Hitler's vicious anti-Semitism as the core of Hitler's appeal — and notes the terrified Jewish community was fleeing from him — but goes on to dismiss it as a play to satiate the rubes (bolding mine):

He is credibly credited with being actuated by lofty, unselfish patriotism. He probably does not know himself just what he wants to accomplish. The keynote of his propaganda in speaking and writing is violent anti-Semitism. His followers are nicknamed the "Hakenkreuzler." So violent are Hitler's fulminations against the Jews that a number of prominent Jewish citizens are reported to have sought safe asylums in the Bavarian highlands, easily reached by fast motor cars, whence they could hurry their women and children when forewarned of an anti-Semitic St. Bartholomew's night.

A sophisticated politician credited Hitler with peculiar political cleverness for laying emphasis and over-emphasis on anti-Semitism, saying: "You can't expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them."

https://www.vox.com/2015/2/11/8016017/ny-times-hitler

Then there's this:



We are F***ed!!!

[mahina]

1. We are not and doom posting is irritating.

Very interesting and astute right up until then.

We certainly can choose to be. Let’s not.

[dalton99a]

2. The New York Times' allegiance is to the oligarchy and Wall Street

not freedom or democracy

[arthritisR_US]

4. And that is the fright.

[dem4decades]

3. I used to wonder how the Hitler/Nazi thing happened, no more.

[arthritisR_US]

5. Their media was the number one player.

[appalachiablue]

7. The Media: Rabid, anti semite Julius Streicher with trash,

'news' newspapers notably Der Sturmer begun in 1924 was critical to the Nazi propganda machine. As well, state- provided radios and programming provided by the Nazis spread hate and lies.



- Hitler rehearsing his speech making.



- Germans listen to Hitler on the radio, 1937. Joseph Goebbels was the head of Nazi Propaganda.

- Julius Streicher (12 Feb. 1885 – 16 Oct. 1946) was a member of the Nazi Party, the Gauleiter (regional leader) of Franconia and a member of the Reichstag, the national legislature.

He was the founder and publisher of the virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, which became a central element of the Nazi propaganda machine. The publishing firm was financially very successful and made Streicher a multi-millionaire.

At the end of the war Streicher was convicted of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trials, and was executed. Streicher was the first member of the Nazi regime held accountable for inciting genocide by the Nuremberg Tribunal.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Streicher



- Germans reading the Der Sturmer 'newspaper' displayed publically in Worms, 1933.



- The body of Julius Streicher after being hanged, Oct. 1946.

[Rhiannon12866]

6. +1000

[dalton99a]

8. "Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so violent or genuine as it sounded."

- New York Times, November 21, 1922

[tanyev]

9. Marking to read later.